Comparing Round-the-World (RTW) fares and options


Every now and then I find myself wondering if there isn’t a better way to get access to some nugget of data related to travel. More often than not I’m disappointed to find out that the answer is generally that the tools aren’t available. When I can, I try to change that. Welcome to my latest effort: The Round-the-World Fare Comparison Tool.

The tool holds nearly 13,000 data points for fare pricing from 197 different airports around the world (one per country for most countries). There are nearly 100 different fare types in the system, including not only RTW fares but also some regional options like Circle Asia, Circle Pacific and Circle Japan options.

That’s a whole lot of data that needs to be managed and filtered. I certainly won’t go so far to claim it is perfect yet – the site is very much in beta right now – but there are options to sort by point of origin, fare type and cabin of travel available right now and more in the works.

Currently there are six different airlines being used as data points for the fares, two each from the three global alliances. In nearly every case the fares match but there are enough quirks and variances that I’m keeping all the data in there and available. The fares do not include taxes, fuel surcharges or aircraft-specific fees but the goal of the tool is to facilitate comparing prices between alliances or to figure out the best place to start a trip rather than get to final pricing.

Here’s what it looks like if you choose a specific origin country/airport:

The different cabins are color-coded so you can quickly see the different types of fares available to you.

Want to search by fare product. Here are the nearly 100 available to you:

Pick one and you’ll get a clickable, color-coded map:

The green icons represent the cheapest 20% of the markets for that specific fare while the red are the most expensive 20%.

I’m still working on options for other ways to "slice and dice" the data. Got a suggestion or an idea of a view that would be useful? Leave a comment and I’ll see what I can do.

In the mean time, give the tool a whirl and let me know what you think. And check out some of the other tools while you’re on the site. You might be surprised at how useful they can be.

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Seth Miller

I'm Seth, also known as the Wandering Aramean. I was bit by the travel bug 30 years ago and there's no sign of a cure. I fly ~200,000 miles annually; these are my stories. You can connect with me on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

7 Comments

  1. Where can you find out what the codes are? I suspect LONE has something to do with Oneworld but I don’t know what the rules are. Great tool anyway

    1. @jorgeluis500: I’m working on adding fare rules and fare descriptions to the site but it is a slow process accumulating all the data. You are correct that LONEx is a oneworld product. The first letter is the booking class (L is economy for oneworld) and the number at the end indicates the number of continents that the fare touches. For some of the fares the number represents how many miles can be flown (in thousands or by tier).

      As is typical I’ve put the cart before the horse, getting the data out there and then back-filling the details. The good news, at least, is that I’m getting better at back-filling the details and making the tools user-friendly (at least I think I am) so I should have this cleaned up in the not too distant future.

      And, yes, that AONE4 from SEZ is insane but it is also, unfortunately, not bookable.

  2. Dude – you are fucking incredible! Thanks for sharing more of your efforts with the FF community.

  3. You are really something. This is impressive.

    Am I reading this correctly: An AONE4 ticket (OW, First Class, 4 continents) would be $3,672 if I start my journey in SEZ and $20,939 if I start in POM?

  4. It’s probably a very old AONE4 fare. There are no OW flights from/to Seychelles nowadays.

    A very nice tool.

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